Salt Library

The tide keeps a library no one can visit— volumes of kelp script curling shut, each wave a page turned back before the sentence ends.

I found a conch once that held not the ocean but the pause between two waves, that hollow second when the water remembers it has somewhere else to be.

Salt crusts the margins of everything left at the waterline: a sandal, a jar lid, the hinge of a crab still opening toward a life it finished weeks ago.

My grandmother said the sea takes one thing and returns another. I dropped a name into the foam and pulled back a fistful of light I couldn't carry home.

Now I press my ear to quiet rooms and hear it—that same pause, the breath between the waves, the library reshuffling its salt-stung pages for no reader, for the pure pleasure of being unread.